My Latest Coffee Preparation Find

I've mostly been drinking English or Scottish breakfast tea instead of coffee lately, but last week I came across this, nearly new, in a thrift store for $2.50, new price $13.19:

It's the Takeya Deluxe Cold Brew Coffee Maker (not an affiliate link).

Since I know the pseudonymous troll will ask, it is "proudly made in the USA, reflecting over 55 years of Japanese design excellence."

Normally I make my cold brew in a French press, but this is a lot easier to clean after use, and you don't risk grounds getting around the plunger screen, because the grounds just go into that center screened canister.

It works very nicely. The screen also seems to be a finer mesh than the French press, and I like using an espresso grind (Cafe Bustelo, which is roasted, ground, and packaged in Florida but sources its beans from countries where coffee actually grows well). Drinking a cup right now, and for those who enjoy a strong cold brew beverage, I highly recommend both that coffee and this device.

If I go back to drinking coffee more often -- I may get tired of the tea -- I'll eventually invest in one of the higher-end consumer-grade espresso machines. My AeroPress is a reasonable substitute, but neither it nor my moka pot quite satisfy the craving for real espresso, which I prefer to regular ol' American-style coffee.

Wordle 1870 Hint

Hint: A more concise form of "punitive."

Not Enough? Get the first letter of today's Wordle after the ad below.

New to Wordle? You can play it at the New York Times, and here are some thoughts on how I go about solving each day's puzzle.

First Letter: P

Applicable(?) Aphorisms #30

"God is the light of the heavens and the earth." (Islam, Quran 24:35)

True, false, good, bad, useful, not so useful, etc.? Discuss.

My thoughts:

The thing about God (or gods) is that we can only hypothesize as to their existence and nature. Not theorize -- a theory has to be testable and falsifiable -- just hypothesize.

Or, rather I can only hypothesize. Perhaps there really are prophets and so forth who have firsthand interactions rising to the level of justified certainty ... but I'm not in a position to truly test their claims, either.

Do I have ideas on the matter? Sure. But those ideas are more about saying "if such entities exist, then here's what I think I can plausibly infer from the characteristics of the reality they've created."

And such inferences necessarily suffer from assumptions such as, say, the assumption that an all-powerful being would not be so perverse as to demand that its creations rebel against the rules implied by the created reality on pain of e.g. eternal punishment in an afterlife.

Based on the history of religious claims, I don't think the above assumption is necessarily a safe one. Consider, for example, the arbitrary and capricious members of the ancient Greek pantheon.

I have no interest in attempting to dissuade believers on any particular claim on the existence or nature of deity, and find many such claims interesting for various reasons, and I don't begrudge a Muslim's acceptance of this week's aphorism. But when it comes to actionable material, the claims don't really mean much to me.